Andy Skelton?

Yeehaw, it's another blog! I'll try and stick to topics relating to WordPress and Automattic, Inc. Of course, nothing here is edited or approved by Automattic or any other entity. These are my views. Your mileage may vary.

Refresh your WordPress Write page often!

The changes aren’t in yet as I write this entry but I’m excited to bring you this news: the WordPress Write pages are being improved!There’s still much to do before we release the next version to the public but if you’re blogging on WordPress.com you have a front-row seat to watch the development. The WYSIWYG editor, based on TinyMCE by Moxiecode Systems AB, already does good things but now it does them even better.

Instead of saving full HTML markup in your WordPress database, we now format the HTML more like you would if you wrote it yourself. <p> tags are stripped unless they have attributes, and &ltbr /> tags are always stripped in favor of simple newlines. This means that you can switch between the rich editor and the plain editor and never have to clean up your code!

There was a bug that caused “&lt;” to be decoded into “<” whenever you edited a post, making it difficult to represent HTML code in blog entries. It’s gone! You can open and save a post without worrying that your visible markup is trashed.

Hotkeys are available for each and every toolbar button. Don’t reach for your mouse when you want a blockquote; press Alt-Q (Ctrl-Q for Mac users) and your current paragraph or selection is indented with blockquote tags. There are more than a dozen of these hotkeys, so we are providing a help screen (Alt-H or Ctrl-H) to remind you.

I’ve heard it from many people (myself included) that the dragging boxes (DBX) are hard to expand and collapse because the +/- targets are so small. No more! There is now almost nine times the clicking area devoted to that function.

Let’s see, what else… if you noticed screwy image link URLs after saving a post, you shouldn’t be seeing that again. All of those URLs now get cleaned up when you save a post.

Now I’m sure I am forgetting something. Was it the new style on the inline uploading form? Could it be the FAQ link or the new logo in the footer? Hmm, I can’t think of anything else… that must be it. If you spot something, let me know!